


Skin

by cirque



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Abuse, Gen, Self Harm, post RE5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The smell of rubber gets everywhere, she knows that now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skin

The smell of rubber gets everywhere, she knows that now. Hair, hands, the little patches of skin between her toes; everything stinks of polyurethane fakery. She feels it against the scars above her heart, hears it creaking when everything else goes quiet.  
  
For three years and countless days she wore that ridiculous cat suit, day in, day out, living and breathing and sweating in a skein of tacky rubber, reptilian green and frightening black. Living in a sterile testing chamber, there wasn’t much need for washing or changing outfits. And later, Wesker had preferred her unwashed, grimy and dirty. She hates Wesker for a lot of things, but forcing her to wear that damned cat suit was the most degrading thing she recalled him doing: dressing her and admiring the way she creaked as she walked. She finds herself wishing she’d been the one to take up a missile launcher and blow him out of this life for good.  
  
For months after, she smells rubber, tastes it at the back of her throat when she swallows. It’s metallic, a dull mercuric tang for which she has no explanation, because she’s been rid of the cat suit for a while now, back to her usual denims and sports clothes; but the taint remains. It comes back easily, the tests, the surgeries, the P-30 and how it pushed its way through her body, pumping towards her heart, the sterile sleeping chamber and the clanking sound of shifting machinery while she slept. But mostly, she sees Wesker and his eyes that told her a thousand horror stories.  
  
Sometimes she can still feel the scaly suit rubbing against her skin, leaving red marks in the crook of her arms. She wakes up smelling burning rubber, and wants to run for miles barefoot just to be able to feel the pad of the earth beneath her soles.  
  
She calls Claire, because nobody else could possibly understand.  
  
“The smell won’t go away,” she says down the phone, “no matter what I do.”  
  
Claire is patient, experienced. Jill always wondered why she didn’t become a doctor; she has healing hands. She’d healed Sherry, Chris, and now Jill. Claire had watched the terror and loss of control as Jill’s body spiralled into panic mode, the ghoulish way that she would fret and shake until she was sure the P30 was taking her over again. Listening to Claire speak on the phone, Jill finds herself amazed that she’s found herself a family.  
  
She has nightmares of Africa, and of that vaguely gritty scented type of sand they have. In Africa she’d been homesick; homesick for RC and the littered streets, homesick for Chris, homesick for the veins of emergency that had kept her going when the world went to hell. She’d felt an amniotic pull to Raccoon City like a burn just beneath her skin, hiding under her thick rubber outer coat.  
  
She washes with a fever, scrubs at her skin ‘til it feels raw beneath her hands. She draws blood, and finds it does mask the smell after all.


End file.
